FRANCAISSecours populaire français - History
1945-1949
-1945-1946, France: under the influence of the labour, unionist and communist movement, the SPF is created after the Secours rouge international, launched in 1921, and the Secours populaire de France et des colonies, created in 1936. The former campaigned for the reprieve of two anarchists (Nicolas Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, executed in the United States in 1927) and provided legal aid in 1935 to the leader of the Bulgarian communist party (Georges Dimitrov, who was living underground, exiled in Germany and accused by Adolf Hitler of putting fire to the Reichstag in 1933). As for the Secours populaire de France et des colonies, it supported the Spanish Republicans and did not send relief on Francesco Franco’s side. Banned in September 1939, it entered the French Resistance; nearly half of its local secretaries were killed, shot or sent to concentration camps during the German occupation. After the Liberation of France in 1944, it came back to light and merged with the National Association of Victims of Nazism to form the SPF, which helped some partisans imprisoned. The first head office of the SPF, as well as two castles that become summer holiday camps, is provided by the COSOR (Committee of Social Work of Resistant Organisations), a body in charge of the administration of property seized on “collaborateurs”. In November 1946, the SPF calls on the population to vote for the communists and some of its members stand on their lists.
-From 1947, Madagascar: the SPF condemns the repression of an anti colonial riot, which leads to many arrests and kills between 11,000 and 89,000 people, depending on available figures. The SPF supports some of the families of the 20,000 people imprisoned on the Island, and provides legal aid to leaders like Joseph Ravoähangy and Joseph Raseta, two MPs who are sentenced to death or hard labour for life in October 1948, but will be freed. This support leads to the creation of a Solidarity Committee with Madagascar, the Fifanam Priana Malagasy, which, under Gisèle Rabesahala’s guidance, will become a regular partner for the SPF’s development actions on the Island.
-October-November 1948, France: the SPF supports the coalminers on strike in the Pas de Calais and the Loire. It provides legal aid and asks for the amnesty of a thousand workers arrested during a state of emergency while Jules Moch, the minister of Interior, had called the army to gain access to the pits.
